Feathers from Wellington’s Waterloo Bicorne, 1815

Envelope addressed ‘To Miss Wood / 39 Craven Street’. Initialled ‘GH’, and bearing Hayter’s black wax armorial seal verso, comprising: A knight’s open helm with the Hayter crest (A Bull's Head Couped Or, Pierced Through The Neck With A Broken Arrow), all above the Persian Star of the Order of the Lion and Sun (worn in his self-portrait of 1843).

Manuscript note in the hand of Sir George Hayter: ’These two feathers were part of the / plume, worn by his Grace Fieldmarshall [sic] / The Duke of Wellington KG / at the Battle of Waterloo 1815 // George Hayter.’

The present feathers, with which Wellington, standing up in Copenhagen’s stirrups, signalled the general advance of Allied armies at Waterloo after the final defeat of the Imperial Guard at about 8.15pm on 18 June 1815, came into Hayter’s possession in 1818. Wellington was recently returned from the Allied occupation of France and the 26 year-old George Hayter a rising star on the London art scene. Hayter’s patron the 6th Duke of Bedford wanted a full length portrait of Wellington for Woburn Abbey that would include his son Lord William Russell who was one of Field Marshal’s aides-de-camp. Accordingly Hayter was one of the first artists to be given a sitting. The resulting portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1820. It shows the Duke standing beside his charger, right arm extended over the horse’s neck and prominently pointing  the swan feather plumage at the viewer, while Lord William looks on from the lower right.

In January 1845 the former ‘enfant terrible’ of the art world, was in his fifties, in debt and slightly out of fashion, when he gifted them to Miss Wood, a relation of the well-to-do Thomas Wood Esq of 39 Craven Street, Strand, London, and squire of the Hanger Hill estate in Middlesex. Hayter was also recently widowed from the estranged wife he had secretly married as a teenager while she was a lodger in his father’s house forty years earlier. Widowhood, theoretically allowed Hayter to make the offer of marriage to Miss Wood, hitherto denied to his erstwhile mistress Louisa Cauty, who died by her own hand in Italy in 1827. With his collection of Old Master paintings and other artworks due to go under the hammer at Christies in May 1845 to alleviate his debts, Hayter’s financial prospects were on the up too. Yet if it was Hayter’s intention to win Miss Wood’s affection with this unique gift, then his efforts were dashed as he married another, (Helena) Cecilia Hyde, née Burke, in May 1846.

Whereas Napoleon’s Waterloo bicorne resides in the Musées de Sens, France, Wellington’s Waterloo bicorne is now lost. The 200th anniversary of the battle saw Napoleon’s hat return to Waterloo as the focal point of an exhibition alongside one of the Duke of Wellington’s hats that date to the 1840s. Similarly two other extant Wellington bicornes found in the public domain are also thought to date to the decades after Waterloo. The first of these is the National Army Museum’s Army Staff cocked hat, 1846 (NAM. 1963-09-319-1); while the second resided in the custody of French SAS, the post-war gift of Nancy Astor. Consequently the present feather’s represent only direct link to the epoch-changing Battle of Waterloo. The historical significance of the feathers was recognised in the 20th century by Cambridge educated Charles-Louis de Beaumont, OBE, Olympic fencer, President of the British Antique Dealers' Association and President elect of the International Federation of Antique Dealers.

Sir George Hayter (1792-1871) Kt, Knight of the Lion and the Sun of Persia, Member of the Academies of St. Luke (Rome), Bologna, Parma, Florence and Venice, was the son of Charles Hayter, a miniature painter and popular drawing-master to Princess Charlotte of Wales. Initially tutored by his father, George Hayter went to the Royal Academy Schools in 1808, but in the same year ran away to join the Royal Navy as a midhipman until his release could be secured by his father. In 1809 he secretly married Sarah Milton, the lodger. Together they had three children. At the Royal Academy Schools he studied under Henry Fuseli, and in 1815 was appointed Painter of Miniatures and Portraits by Princess Charlotte. Around 1816 Sarah left him, for reasons unknown.  He subsequently began his relationship with Louisa Cauty, the daughter of a gallery owner and well known man of the Turf Sir William Cauty. They lived openly together for the next decade setting himsef apart from bourgeois  society and official Royal Academy circles.

Dubbed ‘The Phoenix’ by the mind bogglingly wealthy dilettante William Beckford, Hayter irritated fellow artists, but mixed freely in aristocratic circles. Encouraged by his patron, John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, he travelled to Italy to study in 1816. There he met Antonio Canova, who facilitated his honorary membership of the Accademia di San Luca (Rome's premier artistic institution) on the strength of his painting ‘The Tribute Money’. Hayter thereby became the Academy's youngest ever member, and continued making his name with large scale historical paintings.

In 1826 Hayter returned to Italy with the unfortunate Louisa Cauty, daughter of gallery owner and man of the Turf Sir Wiliam Cauty. Hayter’s painting ‘The Banditti of Kurdistan Assisting Georgians in Carrying off Circassian Women’ completed in Florence for John Proby, 1st Earl of Carysfort demonstrated Hayter's assimilation of the style and exotic subject-matter of contemporary French Romantic art. Louisa died in 1827 after poisoning herself with arsenic. Although it was apparently an accident, in a bid for attention, it was widely assumed that he had driven her to suicide, and he was forced by the scandal to move from Florence to Rome. After a brief stay in Pais painting  portraits of English society figures he returned to England in 1831 to embark on a master work recording the passing of the Great Reform Bill, of which he was an ardent and unexpected supporter. It occupied him for ten years and held no guarantee of financial reward. This is one of the last images executed of the interior of the old House of Commons before its destruction in the fire of 1834. The painting was finally purchased by the government for the nation in 1854, twenty years after it was started.

Hayter painted the young Princess Victoria in 1832 and on the death of Sir David Wilkie in 1841, Hayter's was appointed as Principal Painter in Ordinary to the Queen, causing further annoyance at the Royal Academy. He painted Queen Victoria's coronation of 1838; her marriage of 1840 and also the christening of the Prince of Wales of 1843 (all in the Royal Collection). He was knighted in 1842 but his active period at court was short-lived, owing to Prince Albert preference for German painters such as Winterhalter.